Ready for take-off�
March 1, 2004
As a kid growing up, I would imagine myself as a big rock-star. I would lie in bed at night and have my clock radio playing songs until I got too tired of playing �air-instruments� and fall asleep. I developed into one of the best air-guitarist ever, but could play every air-instrument, and was an excellent air singer too. As part of this dream world, I invented different groups for different genres of music. If it was a slower song, one group took the stage and if it was a hard rock song, another group would take the stage. I even had my best friends and cousins in these bands with me. I had the BF Band for songs by artist with the �big sound�, like ELO or Kansas (BF stood for Bradfield and the band members included all of my cousins on my mother�s side�her and Rich�s mom�s maiden names are Bradfield). I had the Saints for harder rocking bands like AC/DC and Van Halen and Kous (pronounced cous�, as in cousin) for bands like REO Speedwagon and Journey. Kous included me, Rich, Shawn and his cousin Chris (two pairs of cousins, hence the name), who died at 14-years old in a three-wheeler accident just days after we jammed once and were getting ready to start a band. ISSE was the group for top-40 music. After it became a real band, ISSE transformed into ISE because everyone mispronounced it issy, like sissy without the s�not that this made it any clearer that it was pronounced like ice, but it was worth the change. The Jets is the one band name that actually �took flight�. The Jets included me, Rich, and my next-door neighbor, Shawn. This band was introduced during songs played by the likes of the Police and Rush and any other three-piece bands of the time.
Once I found out that Rich loved this idea of all my band names, we started to lip-synch and air guitar to songs using these names. First we would diligently work on the background artwork for the stage with the band names drawn, colored, and taped to the wall behind the performance area in our rooms. We would then throw on 45s and *boom*, instant concert. We would use anything in the room as props. I also would do this kind of �music� stuff with Shawn, who I hung out with every day. He was into music as much as me and Rich and even played drums in a local drum corps and in the school band.
One day in February 1984, Rich was in visiting and we were killing time with Shawn, as usual. Shawn started talking about how his dad had an old guitar, an amp, and a drum set up in his attic. This was a mistake, not for Shawn or us, but for poor Tom & Mary Cray and the entire South Linwood neighborhood. This was the day that we decided to start a band and we would practice in their attic. So we proceeded to climb the stairs until we found our new toys. As is the case with most attics, it was a mess and we needed to clear a path to the hidden toys. Once Mr. Cray heard our plans (must have been the bowling ball falling to the floor that tipped him off that we were there), our payment for using this room and the equipment was to clean. In hindsight, this was a steal of a deal for the use of the space for the next 5 or 6 years.
Once the dust was cleared and most of the second-hand goods found new homes, it was time to jam. There was no rehearsal time and no need for musical mastery. In the pure, Sex Pistol-way, it was time to record. Step one, write lyrics; step two, put to music. In fact, this was our recipe for cooking-up songs the entire Jets life span. The Jets formula to writing songs was to write lyrics and have a pile of them just waiting for the right melody to come along and complete the song. The first song we wrote ever (lyrically really) was Little Girl Pose (you won�t find this in your Trivial Pursuit, Pop Culture Edition or even come out of Cliff Clavin�s mouth). This was truly a collaborative effort. We then had to write the title track as the inaugural song on the album. As I stated earlier, the next thing to do was simultaneously push the play and record buttons on the mono tape player with the mini-microphone that graduate students often use in classes with the Indian professors to get the accented-note translated to legible English. The drum set was positioned further away from the amplified guitar, which was further away from the vocalist for balance. I know this sounds like complicated music engineering stuff, but trust me, it is just simple laws of acoustics that govern our recording studio, now dubbed the �On Top of the World Recording Studio�.
�Ready? One, two, three�� as the buttons are pressed and the music (and I used this term lightly) starts for the title song. Shawn starts pounding a beat you would hear standing at a parade and I start banging out some sort of off-key sound you would hear in a Vietnamese Prisoner of War Camp. We finished this song and went right into Little Girl Pose. Rich again steped up to the mic and started to sing the words, �I went into her room and took off all her clothes, �cause I wanted to see what was behind that little girl pose�� Now before you go and call your local woman�s rights� organizations, this song is not about rape and remember we were 13 and 15 years-old and our hormones wrote the song, not us. Bang, we completed the first two songs. We then pushed rewind to hear our two-song masterpiece-in-one-take, to find that we couldn�t hear Rich�s delicate and puberty-driven voice over the hammering sounds drowning out not only the vocals, but the noise of the howling dogs in the neighborhood. We then examined the state-of-the-art recording device for integrity. After this inspection, it was clear that, while Rich had the most manicured singing voice, he was not the one that would be singing the songs with any accompaniment. I was then nominated to step up to the mic, both figuratively and literally, to re-record these two songs and the remainder of the collection.
The rest of the songs on the �Flying High� album went just like this one. We had a few soft a cappella songs about girls and love, but for the most part it was an album about teenage angst. The music was crude and our lyrics were better than Nirvana�s �Nevermind� at portraying the fragile emotions of what happens when hormones take over your body. We recorded 22 songs in little over a month (February 18 � March 19, 1984), which included many songs with parts inspired by Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Most songs were done tongue-in-cheek and made us laugh, so the music became secondary. We loved listening to the art we had just created and didn�t care what people would think about it�it was ours. We had a blast recording these compositions and that is basically what it boiled-down to become. At this point, we decided to start to take this stuff seriously. Each of us began to taking lessons and looking for more band-mates to help us get to stardom. It was this one fun-loving album, �Flying High�, which got our musical careers off the ground and for that, it was a true master-piece. Rich and Shawn both went on to continue to play in �regular bands�, while I sat on the sidelines cheering for my musical counterparts. I chose to stop playing guitar seriously and concentrate on my wife and family and my profession, but there isn�t a day that goes by where I wished that we could have kept this line-up forever. We kept our music simple and never took it too seriously and that was one of the reasons we got so much enjoyment from the music. The other reason was it was a labor of love, built on our close friendship.
Public Service Announcement: To read more about the Jets and all of Dan�s Real Bands, go to the Dan�s Musical Resume web site. |
